By Peter Dickrill 13 May 2019 (Science Alert) – Yet another alarming milestone of humanity’s damaging effect on the environment has now officially been reached – crossing a barrier into a hot, polluted future like the planet hasn’t witnessed in millions of years. This weekend, sensors in Hawaii recorded Earth’s atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide […]
By Rebecca Morelle 13 May 2019 (BBC News) — An American explorer has found plastic waste on the seafloor while breaking the record for the deepest ever dive. Victor Vescovo descended nearly 11km (seven miles) to the deepest place in the ocean – the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench. He spent four hours exploring the bottom […]
By Brad Plumer8 January 2019 WASHINGTON (The New York Times) – America’s carbon dioxide emissions rose by 3.4 percent in 2018, the biggest increase in eight years, according to a preliminary estimate published Tuesday. Strikingly, the sharp uptick in emissions occurred even as a near-record number of coal plants around the United States retired last […]
BOSTON, Massachusetts, 27 August 2018 (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health) – Rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) from human activity are making staple crops such as rice and wheat less nutritious and could result in 175 million people becoming zinc deficient and 122 million people becoming protein deficient by 2050, according to new […]
24 January 2018 (Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences) – On 19 May 2016 the afternoon temperature reached 51.0◦C in Phalodi in the northwest of India – a new record for the highest observed maximum temperature in India. The previous year, a widely reported very lethal heat wave occurred in the southeast, in Andhra Pradesh […]
By Matt McGrath 8 July 2018 (BBC News) – Cut-price Chinese home insulation is being blamed for a massive rise in emissions of a gas, highly damaging to the Earth’s protective ozone layer. The Environmental Investigations Agency (EIA) found widespread use of CFC-11 in China, even though the chemical was fully banned back in 2010. […]
4 January 2018 (SERC) – In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis 27 October 2017 (Mongabay) – A new study in PLOS ONE reveals a 76 percent reduction in Germany’s flying insect biomass over the past 27 years while another reports the country’s bird abundance has declined 15 percent in just over a decade. While the causes behind the insect decline haven’t yet been […]
18 October 2017 (IWWR) – Since 1989, in 63 nature reserves in Germany the total biomass of flying insects has decreased by more than 75 percent. This decrease has long been suspected but has turned out to be more severe than previously thought. Ecologists from Radboud University together with German and English colleagues published these […]
30 April 2016 (NOAA) – The annual greenhouse gas index (AGGI) is a measure of the warming influence of long-lived trace gases and how that influence is changing each year. The index was designed to enhance the connection between scientists and society by providing a normalized standard that can be easily understood and followed. The […]
